There are several platforms that provide these apps, but one of the most popular and reliable is PortableApps. I just wish they had more admin apps in their collection.As mentioned earlier, Portable apps are very easy to use just download and click to run. To launch a protable app from the menu, select it and double-click, or hit the enter key. I couldn’t change the 5-sec delay in Snagit and it takes 3 seconds or so for the notification items to clear, so perforce you see both here. Click that, and you get a menu that lets you pick from the list of portable apps you’ve installed. Then a portable menu becomes accessible through the portable apps icon in the notification area on the Taskbar. Once you’ve got your portable apps installed, run start.exe from the root of the UFD (or wherever else you might put your portable platform). You can find a complete directory of the more than 300 portable apps available for this project on its Portable App Directory page.

Chrome and Opera take longest (1-2 minutes each) some items install in less than 5 seconds the major seem to take 20-35 seconds. CPU usage never spikes that much, so this appears to be a mostly IO-bound activity. This takes a while longer (perhaps 20 minutes all told). Then I get into a rhythm with the remaining 27 items.

It takes about 5 minutes to download the 28 items I chose, and another litte while before I realize I have to grant permission for the apps on my list to get installed on the Mushkin UFD.

I see bandwidth levels jumping into the hundreds of Mbps, so it doesn’t appear overly throttled. Click next and it tells me I’ve got 28 items to grab, which it starts downloading in the order specified. There are hundreds of options from which one can choose of which - strictly for grins - I chose Notepad++, IrfanView, Chrome, FileZilla, Firefox, Opera, AIMP, Audacity, VLC, Hijack This, Kaspersky TDSSKiller, PWGen, 7-ZIP, CPU-Z, CrystalDiskInfo, CrystalDiskMark, Explorer++, GeekUninstaller, GPU-Z, SSD-Z, TreeSize Free, WhatChanged, WinDirStat, Windows Error Lookup Tool, and World Clock. The Platform window pops up, followed by a fill-in form that allows you to choose portable apps to install in your personalized environment. Then, click Install to start the installation. Your basic range of portable app targets: USB drive, local drive, or in the cloud. Of the many targets available for this screen shot I chose a 64GB Mushkin USB 3.0 flash drive. You’ll start off by downloading the PortableApps setup environment from the download page.

Portable apps world